Introduction: Food Should Be Free For All

I want to introduce myself but not with too much detail because I don't like putting my identity out on the internet if I can avoid it. I live in a city in on the West Coast of the USA. I've spent over a decade living abroad in other countries and traveling. I speak 3 languages. I've done graduate studies in Public Health as well as Computer Science. I currently work as a professional software engineer. I've worked with just about everything under the sun in the tech world. This goes from simple website development, to cloud engineering, to AI and machine learning as well as robotics. I've also recently started to dabble in mechanical engineering, but I'm not a professional in this area, just a hobbyist. I also 💛 my wife and my dogs. I just want to tell you this so you know where I am coming from as I introduce this blog.

I have decided to embark on a mission. The mission is to improve my skills and learn more about sustainable living. This mission is personal but I also want to see if I can come up with some strategies and solutions that can be used by small communities and even entire cities to also live more sustainably. The goal is not to create a website where I publish a new wordy blog every so often. Rather, most of the entries on this blog will focus on projects that I am doing at home or in my community. The goal is that these blog entries will serve as resources or documentation so that folks can see what I'm doing and recreate these projects for themselves. Some of the projects will include but are not limited to:

1. Building a mechanical and automated vertical greenhouse. The greenhouse should support hundreds of square feet of vertical grow space in a 25 square foot area.
2. Building and programming a robot to "manage" the greenhouse.
3. Document and build a basic planter box.
4. Develop a strategy for composting at home.
5. Setup a solar/wind power generation system.
6. Develop a system for irrigating the vertical greenhouse with hydroponics. The system will include a store bought fertilizer component as well as a homemade fertilizer component using aquaponic techniques.
7. Stretch goal: Build a miniaturized Earth Power Lodge such as what is seen on the documentary "The Need to Grow"
8. Stretch goal: Develop and document a process for creating bio-diesel at home.
9. Stretch goal: Develop an admin dashboard for the robotic systems so that farmers can manage their robots and their farms from their couch.
10. Stretch goal: Build my own Brushed DC motor from scratch and set it up as a wind turbine power generator. A true DIY wind power generator from scratch.
11. Stretch goal: Develop a software platform that helps city planners design the infrastructure and supply chains required for self reliant, organic, food production systems.
12. Stretch goal: Develop a miniaturized automated system for constructing free homes for people. Since it is miniaturized, maybe this will be a free homes for cats.

As you can tell this blog has the potential to deal with a lot. The primary focus for the years of 2026 and 2027 will be items 1-6. I am quite confident that I can complete all of those items and document them on this site by the end of 2027. Each one of the stretch goals is potentially a lot in themselves. I doubt I will get through all of the stretch goals in my lifetime. But we'll see where I go next after items 1-6 are complete.

The reason I decided to embark on this mission is complicated. Part of it is due to an observation that I've made: these basic skills such as building a home, managing a farm, creating your own power infrastructure are very important skills but few people really have them today. We've outsourced all this skill that communities used to have, to companies. In the process we've gone on to do "more important work" by working for billionaires to meet their bottom line and society has been effected with a sort of brain drain in this area. I want to correct this for myself. Another reason, and maybe the more significant reason to go down this path is due to a plain observation. Our current way of government and economy doesn't work. I want to create some momentum towards change and I think addressing some of the fundamental aspects about our way of life is the best place to start. Here are the primary observations that led me to this conclusion.

1. Aside from a few exceptions, big government mostly exists to control people. People are like herds of cattle for billionaires but they get the government to be the shepherd . Whether you live in a capitalist, socialist or communist country, really at the end of the day the government is there to control you on behalf of the billionaires and there is not much motivation for them to facilitate true freedom. Because your dependence and obedience equals their extraordinary wealth.
2. The modern economy is so stupid it boggles my mind. Most of the jobs in the modern economy are either solving problems that exist because of a corrupt or inefficient system, are enabling a scam or facilitating the scammers. Most of the important jobs are given no respect whatsoever. The people that are "highly respected" and hold the jobs that we are all told to aspire to make solid 6,7,8 figures involve basically just sitting in meetings and on zoom calls to figure out how to hurt other people by either exploiting people or laying them off. It's terrible. There is little incentive or effort to solve the real problems humans face and in the wake of this economy is violence, war, genocide and ecocide.
3. War is a requirement for participating in the global economy. Wars are fought in the interests of the economic pillars of society which associate strongly with the billionaires and the elites of the world. Aside from the certain horror that war brings, it is a short term economic solution at best for the country waging the war. This requirement for war, has led advanced countries like the USA, Russia, China etc to invest so heavily in R&D to do war, that we now have weapons that could wipe billions of people off the planet if they were ever used. This is madness, and until we have an economy that doesn't require growth for our economy to work, this will continue to to be the case.
4. The environment is getting trashed by everybody regardless if it is capitalism, socialism or communism. I think I would argue that the "need" to have a military is the entry point for this but it is also sustained by the role of profit in financial systems. Trashing the environment seems to be an unavoidable problem that our current system creates. But when you examine it, in the context of what humans need to live happy, healthy free lives most of the trashing is to sustain inefficient or unnecessary systems. The kicker to it all is that some of these systems while we depend on them also double as systems of control. We need them to not starve, get kicked out of our homes, to go to work etc. Some might even go so far to call this an updated form of slavery. But it all is preventing humanity from entering a golden age. We can live sustainably, peacefully and with more freedom and better health, but we need to rethink and update some of the systems to do this.

Given these problems and if left unchecked, humanity is in for a very rude awakening. I say humanity because all humans will be effected despite the fact that a small number of countries and people are responsible for the big mess we're in. Whether it's nuclear war or environmental degradation that gets so bad humans can't survive on earth anymore, humans are toast unless we change something. I also don't think it's as much doom and gloom as many social and environmental activists would have you believe. The path to a brighter future for humanity where everybody has better health, a quality home, more free time, an affordable way of life and all in better equilibrium with the environment is a lot easier than many think. The problem is not our technology or not enough finite resources. The problem is us, it is our culture that's preventing us from getting where we need to go. If we can all get on the same page and decide that we want to live in a different way, we can make it happen quite quickly. I firmly believe that. However, A collapse of the global economy is likely to happen at some point if we don't make significant change but there is still time to turn the ship around. The longer we wait, the more painful the transition (or collapse) will be.

While I embark on this mission I intend to develop a plan for communities and cities to start preparing themselves for this transition to the new world. I strongly believe that a major aspect of this transition will be to responsibly and intelligently provide free food and free housing to everybody.

Because this is a solutions oriented blog, free food is going to be the primary focus. While I would love to cover free housing, it's a bit unfeasible which I'll get to shortly. One of the interesting things about tackling the food problem, is that it provides an opportunity to address so many other problems. However to do this we need to be SMART about how we create the next generation food production systems. For example with an optimal food production system, we can drastically reduce global green house gas emissions. We can also develop systems that are completely organic, no pesticides or herbicides. We can remove the international dependence we have to grow our own food so that localized communities are self sufficient. We can also address the plastic pollution problem. We can separate our food production systems from the environment by moving them indoors and making our entire food security infrastructure more resilient in the face of climate change. Traditional farming is extremely damaging to the environment and requires an immense amount of water. All of these problems are not required to feed 10 billion people, we can clean this process up, make it better and bring the cost of groceries to 0$. So as you can see, we can do a lot by updating this system and it is not just about free food. It's also about saving the environment and bringing actual freedom to people.

However, what do I mean by free food? I need to clarify. Only certain kinds of food are feasible to be free. Getting pizza delivered will probably never be free, a pint of ice cream at the grocery store will probably never be free. In general prepared foods will not be free. I say this mainly to set some expectations. There could be some systems that pop up down the road that provide free prepared foods, but that comes later and almost certainly will be based on the ingredients themselves being free. We need to focus on the basics first. As a first step, the distinguishing factor between what food should be free and what should not be free really comes down to the degree that its production can be be automated. It's important to keep in mind that automation of food production is not just about the technology that humans create but also what nature already does. Nature provides the mechanisms of photosynthesis, transpiration and many other natural processes that contribute to life and the production of resources. So when we think about automation, we need to consider those processes as well. The result should be technology meeting nature to sustain it and provide for humanity. However prepared and processed requires significant infrastructure and human work. Therefore it's unfeasible to make these things free without significant subsidies, which I don't think is sustainable economically or politically. We need to do this without redistribution. We need to create a new world by relying on where the power is, with the people, and not redistributing from billionaires to subsidize inefficient and dysfunctional systems.

All that being said anything that can be grown, picked, and put right into your mouth can and should be free without redistribution. I mean it was like this for the Native Americans and other indigenous people for 1000s of years so why are we charging people money for these things today? Doesn't sound like progress to me. That's another way to look at what food should be free though. The things that were free for indigenous people should be free for people today. Some examples of these foods include leafy greens, berries, potatoes, grains or anything else you can grow. Basically most real food can and should be free. The amount of work to make 1 plant grow to the point of producing food is remarkably little on the part of the human. However the trick, obviously, is making enough food for everybody year around which is where it gets tricky. The trouble here is scaling. But I think with some clever engineering we can make simple systems that completely automate the entire life-cycle of any fruit or vegetable in an organic, sustainable and environmentally friendly way and do so at the scale so that we can feed large populations in rural or urban areas. Some crops may be more difficult than others to create systems for this but many of the basics, leafy greens, berries, tomatoes, beans and really much if not most of what you find in the produce section at the grocery store can be completely automated with simple robotic systems.

As mentioned above I am also very interested in free housing. I think this is a critical feature of a new world and while I would love to really explore that on this blog, the requirements as I see them are much more complex than everything else described above. The main reason for this is while the standards of food for people haven't really changed in 1000s of years, what we consider a quality home really has. In addition to it being technically more complex to create suitable homes for people it is also much more expensive to implement. As of this writing, I do have a basic idea of how this could work but I estimate that I would need at least 5 million dollars and probably more just to pay for the infrastructure and land required. For example, I would need to build a factory complete with an industrial CNC Machine and other tools present in modern machine and wood shops, a lumber mill, at least 100 acres of forest that is zoned for timber harvesting, some semi trucks and more. This is too much for 1 person of my economic standing and without a business plan to generate profits there is no hope for investment. It is also worth mentioning that there already some organizations that are doing the work work that would be required for a free housing system in the way that I envision it. Checkout wikihouse to see what some folks are doing to create automated and modular construction systems for building homes sustainably. How these folks are manufacturing homes is the future for providing affordable homes to everybody on earth. The only thing that is really missing from wikihouse to truly create a free housing platform is to integrate that with a sustainable and robust supply chain of raw renewable materials and logistics network for distribution of the materials. I hope that if my free food system gets some popularity it will draw attention to free housing. With more attention to it and more people on board, maybe we can then accumulate the resources required to tackle this. But until that time unfortunately I just won't be able to really dive deep into it, but please checkout wikihouse, because they are already making progress in this area.

As previously mentioned the focus of this website is to explore the design, construction and function of sustainable communities with a special focus on developing free food systems. The goal is to create a completely open source documentation of these systems so others can build them themselves by copying what's here. Hopefully some folks even take these designs further and build off them or even decide they can do something way better by starting over from scratch. If you're one of these people, please create a website or contact me so I can take a look and learn from you 😄.

Anyways, this a short summary of what is in store for this website. If you decide to check back from time to time, I hope you enjoy. I have disabled the social media aspect of this website, so there is no commenting. If you want to send me a question or comment you can email me. Please include in the email subject "greenhackery" or I may not receive it.

Thank you!